"The end of the world is a growth industry."

Although not a journalist I am affected by what they do, usually on a
minute-to-minute basis, which gives one a real incentive to have what is
admittedly a fuzzy (vague, incomplete etc) overview of what they-and other storytellers-are thinking about.
So I read stuff.

From Aeon:

End-times for humanityHumanity is more technologically powerful than ever before, and yet we feel ourselves to be increasingly fragile. Why?

The end of the world is a growth industry. You can almost feel
Armageddon in the air: from survivalist and ‘prepper’ websites
(survivopedia.com, doomandbloom.net, prepforshtf.com) to new academic
disciplines (‘disaster studies’, ‘Anthropocene studies’, ‘extinction
studies’), human vulnerability is in vogue.

The panic isn’t merely
about civilisational threats, but existential ones. Beyond doomsday
proclamations about mass extinction, climate change, viral pandemics,
global systemic collapse and resource depletion, we seem to be seized by
an anxiety about losing the qualities that make us human. Social media,
we’re told, threatens our capacity for empathy and genuine connection.
Then there’s the disaster porn and apocalyptic cinema, in which zombies,
vampires, genetic mutants, artificial intelligence and alien invaders are oh-so-nearly human that they cast doubt on the value and essence of the category itself.

How
did we arrive at this moment in history, in which humanity is more
technologically powerful than ever before, and yet we feel ourselves to
be increasingly fragile? The answer lies in the long history of how
we’ve understood the quintessence of ‘the human’, and the way this
category has fortified itself by feeding on the fantasy of its own
collapse. Fears about the frailty of human wisdom go back at least as
far as Ancient Greece and the fable of Plato’s cave, in which humans are
held captive and can only glimpse the shadows of true forms flickering
on the stone walls. We prisoners struggle to turn towards the light and
see the source (or truth) of images, and we resist doing so. In another
Platonic dialogue, the Phaedrus, Socrates worries that the very
medium of knowledge – writing – might discourage us from memorising and
thinking for ourselves. It’s as though the faculty of reason that
defines us is also something we’re constantly in danger of losing, and
even tend to avoid.

This paradoxical logic of loss – in which we
value that which we’re at the greatest risk of forsaking – is at work in
how we’re dealing with our current predicament. It’s only by
confronting how close we are to destruction that we might finally do
something; it’s only by embracing the vulnerability of humanity itself
that we have any hope of establishing a just future. Or so say the sages
of pop culture, political theory and contemporary philosophy.
Ecological destruction is what will finally force us to act on the
violence of capitalism, according to Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014). The philosopher Martha Nussbaum
has long argued that an attempt to secure humans from fragility and
vulnerability explains the origins of political hierarchies from Plato
to the present; it is only if we appreciate our own precarious bodily
life, and the emotions and fears that attach to being human animals,
that we can understand and overcome racism, sexism and other irrational
hatreds. Disorder and potential destruction are actually opportunities
to become more robust, argues Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Antifragile (2012) – and in Thank You for Being Late (2016), the New York Times’
columnist Thomas Friedman claims that the current, overwhelming ‘age of
accelerations’ is an opportunity to take a pause. Meanwhile, Oxford
University’s Future of Humanity Institute pursues
research focused on avoiding existential catastrophes, at the same time
as working on technological maturity and ‘superintelligence’.

It’s
here that one can discern a tight knit between fragility and virility.
‘Humanity’ is a hardened concept, but a brittle one. History suggests
that the more we define ‘the human’ as a subject of intellect, mastery and progress – the more ‘we’ insist on global unity under the umbrella of a supposedly universal kinship – the less possible it becomes to imagine any other mode of existence as human. The apocalypse is typically depicted as humanity reduced to mere life, fragile,
exposed to all forms of exploitation and the arbitrary exercise of
power. But these dystopian future scenarios are nothing worse than the
conditions in which most humans live as their day-to-day reality. By
‘end of the world’, we usually mean the end of our world. What
we don’t tend to ask is who gets included in the ‘we’, what it cost to
attain our world, and whether we were entitled to such a world in the
first place.

Stories about the end of time have a
long history, from biblical eschatology to medieval plague narratives.
But our fear of a peculiarly ‘human’ apocalypse really begins with the
18th-century Enlightenment. This was the intellectual birthplace of the
modern notion of ‘humanity’, a community of fellow beings united by
shared endowments of reason and rights. This humanist ideal continues to
inform progressive activism and democratic discourse to this day.
However, it’s worth taking a moment to go back to René Descartes’s
earlier declaration of ‘I think, therefore I am’, and ask how it was
possible for an isolated self to detach their person from the world, and
devote writing, reading and persuasion to the task of defending an
isolated and pure ego. Or fast-forward a few centuries to 1792, and
consider how Mary Wollstonecraft had the time to read about the rights
of man, and then demand the rights of woman.

The novelist Amitav Ghosh provides a compelling answer in his study of global warming, The Great Derangement
(2017). Colonisation, empire and climate change are inextricably
intertwined as practices, he says. The resources of what would become
the Third World were crucial in creating the comfortable middle-class
existences of the modern era, but those resources could not be made
available to all: ‘the patterns of life that modernity engenders can
only be practised by a small minority … Every family in the world cannot
have two cars, a washing machine and a refrigerator – not because of
technical or economic limitations but because humanity would asphyxiate
in the process.’

Ghosh disputes one crucial aspect of the story of
humanity: that it should involve increasing progress and inclusion
until we all reap the benefits.....MUCH MORE